Month: March 2017

If autistic traits were purely bad, natural selection would’ve eliminated them by now. Thus, we need to account for the evolutionary advantages of autism. This is a thought-provoking attempt at doing that, which has been expanded into a book called The Prehistory of Autism. The paper makes me want to read the book. The important…

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick published a misguided apology for slavery in Aeon. He admits as much in the comments: The premise is that he went to India, talked to some slaveholders, and rediscovered things slaveholders said back in the 1800s. You can tell how naive he is from the first paragraph: I liked Aanan as soon as…

Stephen Camarata did the world a favor by writing The Intuitive Parent. It’s the antidote to all the parenting problems I’ve been fixated on for the last few weeks. Camarata is a professor at Vanderbilt, specialist in late-talking children, and father of seven (!) children. The book is from 2015, so it’s even presumably up-to-date.…

Priscilla Gilman’s The Anti-Romantic Child wasn’t an enjoyable autism memoir I can identify with, like Songs of the Gorilla Nation. It has a lot of things to comment on, though, since this is the third post about it. I thought she made a really interesting observation about the discourses surrounding dyslexia vs. hyperlexia. I hadn’t…

I don’t think it’s intuitive for a lot of people that psychiatric labels are names for patterns of behavior and that’s it. A diagnosis fits you if you’re acting a lot like the pattern, in the opinion of someone whose opinion may or may not count for bureaucratic purposes. The underlying reality doesn’t change when…

I suspect that some of the tragic consequences of autism are iatrogenic, i.e., caused by the treatments and parents themselves. These parents have trouble empathizing with their children for narcissistic reasons. These are the parents that need their children to be normal and care what everyone else thinks, and it’s a widespread issue. The Anti-Romantic…

This is the second post reading Mari Ruti’s The Ethics of Opting Out in terms of autism. Maybe interpreting everything in terms of autism will become a new school of literary criticism. The first post was about nonverbal autism as a rebellion against the desire of the Other. This is a discussion of autism acceptance…